Mesmerise is a crappy trans skill. It would not be terrible to see it moved down with something else put in as the trans skill. But then again, I think hypnosis is pretty much fine as a whole skill.

And mesmerise is a fine skill in general.

It's crappy for "fair" fights and its utility in theft was reduced by theft being all but annihilated, but it's absolutely great for any kind of RP assassination. It actually gives you a means to set a sort of "trap" for an enemy by getting close to them either socially or sneakily and then implanting something you can exploit when you spring the trap. I can think of a number of very good uses for it and I've done some of them. I would be very sad to see it go. If anything, it could use a buff - given the drawbacks it shouldn't just be a much lower chance of being detected, it should be no chance of the attempt being detected. That would be more fitting for a trans skill too.

How about being able to use it from phase? Same limitations as it currently has, just allows for hypnosis implanting during phase, albeit a lot slower.

Personally I would find it far to easy to gank people with this method. In theory at least. I could mesmerize Impatince backstab from phase then sleep lock. Although to be fair I could already do this and then snipe Delphinium so nevermind.The chances of them having rebounding up of course are alot better if they're afk some where.

It would be no more interesting than the current assassination mechanic, it would just give you a better chance of doing it. You are doing the exact same thing, implanting the exact same afflictions, but now, you do it with half the risk!Saying that making something easier is more interesting is generally false. If something is already undetectable, then why make it two kinds of undetectable? If you wanted something to just go through phase, why not just make normal hypnosis go through phase? adding a few seconds onto something where you simply can't be interacted with doesn't change anything at all.

Phase=undetectable (mostly)Mesmerize=undetectablewhy in the world would you combine them? That's just a horrible idea.

Mesmerise should let you condition hypnosis chains to be triggered by additional stimuli other than snap, like spoken words and other actions. Hearing a word or phrase, someone entering or leaving the room, wielding, removing, wearing, mounting, etc. Imagine the possibilities. Serpents lost a lot of their serpent-ness with theft, so letting them play Manchurian Candidate would be totes awes.

If we're going with Daeir's phased mesmerize, I wouldn't mind seeing action being taken off the list (for mesmerize) simply because of kick guard. I've seen it so often when people leave city/get hypnotized/come back (mainly by Jarrel but whatever), so I wouldn't like to see someone phase in, mesmerize, unphase, snap kick guard, earring.

Alternatively, fix guards to not mind a kick or even a bashing attack or two.

Or just fix action to not allow interaction with denizens, the same way it blocks eating snowblossoms and other greify stuff. Or fix guards to not respond so violently to being kicked by neutral/citizen players.

No. As few things as absolutely possible should remain unforceable. It's already annoying that you often can't tell whether one thing is forceable or not without testing it first, and in some cases it seems a bit arbitrary. Abilities like that are entirely based around openness, and the more this is removed in the direction of working off a whitelist, the more boring they become, and the more are we removing inventiveness from the game.

I'd prefer a slight change to guards to that, in the vein Vaehl suggested. Maybe a guard (of your own city) might just shout at you and attack you once if you attack him once, but not begin to actually attack you continuously until you strike him a second time.

Very true. I like Blu's idea the most out of all the ones suggested so far. Could do some really cool stuff with that. Taking action off the list is a no-go, though. I'd rather have an even worse version of mesmerise than lose access to action.

Several things that were once deleted for bugginess were later reintroduced though. E.g. arenawatch.

Just because some thing was once implemented in a buggy way doesn't mean it can't be reimplemented in a better form. Blujixapug's suggestion however doesn't seem entirely serious, despite the note on the bottom. Clearly it would be ridiculously powerful like that...

I'd actually say forging is the most useless trans skill of all and not because fullplate is bad (its great in fact) but because you can trans forging once, class change to anything and go back to a knight class and wear that same fullplate 400 years later. Oh right you also have to spend an additional 400 credits to buy a hammer to even forge something worthwhile of keeping.

Bolded is incorrect. Highs and lows able to be reached are the same with a hammer as without it. I will however agree that the hammer is invaluable, along with Master Forger, in cranking out more product/hr and therefore improving your odds of being struck by lightning in a given hour, as it were.

Suicidemice. A trans skill that you can't use if you're not a member of a certain House. (unless that's been changed?)

That's not entirely true, at least it wasn't when I quit. You just need to either bribe someone in the house, or befriend them enough to let you use it. I let a few people use the Mouse Re-education Room during my years in the house.

Mesmerise should let you condition hypnosis chains to be triggered by additional stimuli other than snap, like spoken words and other actions. Hearing a word or phrase, someone entering or leaving the room, wielding, removing, wearing, mounting, etc. Imagine the possibilities. Serpents lost a lot of their serpent-ness with theft, so letting them play Manchurian Candidate would be totes awes.

Suicidemice. A trans skill that you can't use if you're not a member of a certain House. (unless that's been changed?)

That's not entirely true, at least it wasn't when I quit. You just need to either bribe someone in the house, or befriend them enough to let you use it. I let a few people use the Mouse Re-education Room during my years in the house.

I've found so many abusable mechanics with mice. In their current form, mice should never be made public without some tweaks, and I'm afraid those tweaks would render the skill pretty useless.

Suicidemice. A trans skill that you can't use if you're not a member of a certain House. (unless that's been changed?)

That's not entirely true, at least it wasn't when I quit. You just need to either bribe someone in the house, or befriend them enough to let you use it. I let a few people use the Mouse Re-education Room during my years in the house.

I've found so many abusable mechanics with mice. In their current form, mice should never be made public without some tweaks, and I'm afraid those tweaks would render the skill pretty useless.

They've never been used enough to get looked at for balance. That's part of the problem. But they aren't any more abuseable than Phys Transfusion or Necro Soulcage. Takes 3 months to educate the mice. Plus the cost of cheese and time it takes to catch them.

So say it is the most useless transcendent skill (it's not, but let's pretend)

Serpents get abilities before transcendent, like

snipe

evade

shrugging

execution

that are more useful than some other classes trans ability, plus they throw in

scales

weaving

wormholes

etc.

for free.. seems like a pretty good deal to me

Snipe is nice, evade is fantastic, shrugging is amazing, execute is a
standard instant kill. Scales is nice, weaving is nice, wormholes can be
accessed by an artefact and just about every other ability is a niche
one at best. Just because the rest of a Serpent's skillset is quite good
does not explicitly provide an excuse for mesmerise being so bad.

That's like arguing that an athlete with a poorly made prosthetic leg
should man up deal with it because the rest of them works better than
the average person, even if his leg could be fixed with a little tweaking.

My
understanding of transcendent skills is that they are supposed to be
the thing that ties the skillset together, most skillsets have pretty
fantastic ones which dramatically alter how the skillset actually
performs in the world. Sometimes they are flat passive enhancements like
supercharge and transcretion, other times they are core aspects of raid
utility like cataclysm, so on, so forth. Transcendent skills are
supposed to be the ultra super amazing cherry on the top of the skillset
cake, and mesmerise simply isn't that. Action is, if we look at
Hypnosis. Hell, you could swap the places of the two around in the skill tree and that'd be that, in all honesty.

I was worried someone would say that. It would be ugly if Action were moved to the trans skill. Thematically appropriate, yes - but it's a core part of a lot of combat strategies and I wouldn't want to see it at trans. If anything, it should be moved down now that theft got nerfed.

I think it's absolutely true that serpent has plenty of great abilities in each of the skillsets. I think it's also true that mesmerise is lacklustre as a trans skill even if I seem to disagree rather strongly on it being useless.

Being able to use it phased would be a step in the right direction. Alternatively, getting any other sort of non-combat information-gathering tool would be neat, like, say, a way to hypnotise people to make them SAY their last few utterances or something similarly interesting (SUGGEST <target> SPEAK CT/HTS/HT/HNT/OT/SAY, treating their speaking/channel history as a stack with, say, ten max elements and having it pop off the next one for each SPEAK suggestion implanted within a single hypnosis (so implanting five and snapping then implanting five and snapping would reveal the same five each time)). Really, I don't think the class needs any more big (or even little really) combat things.

@Tael: That is a wonderful idea. I wholly support anything that makes espionage more accessible.

I give it two hours before people come into the thread complaining about how abilities that help with espionage are a bad idea because they'd rather it not be "hard-coded" and spying should only be about social engineering and sitting phased in dangerous places. That was mostly why I added the "not an actual suggestion" bit as an afterthought.